Giordano Bruno

Giordano Bruno (1548 to 1600), born Filippo Bruno in Nola near Naples, was an Italian Dominican friar and priest who worked as a philosopher, poet, alchemist and cosmological theorist. He took up the Copernican model and went well beyond it, proposing that the stars are distant suns with planets of their own, that some of those worlds might support life, and that the universe is infinite and has no centre. He also wrote widely on the art of memory, a set of mnemonic techniques, and followed a Hermetic and mystical approach to nature. Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition for denying several core Catholic doctrines and was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600. His fame grew after his death, and later writers often treated him as a martyr for science, although historians disagree about whether his cosmology or his religious views drove the trial.